A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later

Lytro's light field camera lets a user explore different focus points after an image is taken, as in this picture.Credit
Eric Cheng/Lytro.com

With an innovative camera due out later this year from a company called Lytro, photographers will have one less excuse for having missed that perfect shot.

The company’s technology allows a picture’s focus to be adjusted after it is taken. While viewing a picture taken with a Lytro camera on a computer screen, you can, for example, click to bring people in the foreground into sharp relief, or switch the focus to the mountains behind them.

But is Lytro’s technology just a neat feature, or is it the next big thing in cameras?

The founding team of the Silicon Valley start-up and investors who have put in $50 million are betting on the latter. The technology has won praise from computer scientists and raves from early users of its prototype camera.

“We see technology companies all the time, but it’s rare that someone comes along with something that is this much of a breakthrough,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a major investor in Lytro. “It’s superexciting.”

Lytro’s founder and chief executive is Ren Ng, 31. His achievement, experts say, has been to take research projects of recent years — requiring perhaps 100 digital cameras lashed to a supercomputer — and squeeze that technology into a camera headed for the consumer market later this year.

Mr. Ng explained the concept in 2006 in his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford University, which won the worldwide competition for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science that year from the Association for Computing Machinery. Since then Mr. Ng has been trying to translate the idea into a product that can be brought to market — and building a team of people to do it.

The Lytro camera captures far more light data, from many angles, than is possible with a conventional camera. It accomplishes that with a special sensor called a microlens array, which puts the equivalent of many lenses into a small space. “That is the heart of the breakthrough,” said Pat Hanrahan, a Stanford professor, who was Mr. Ng’s thesis adviser but is not involved in Lytro.

But the wealth of raw light data comes to life only with sophisticated software that lets a viewer switch points of focus. This allows still photographs to be explored as never before. “They become interactive, living pictures,” Mr. Ng said. He thinks a popular use may be families and friends roaming through different perspectives on pictures of, say, vacations and parties posted on Facebook (Lytro will have a Facebook app).

For a photographer, whether amateur or professional, the Lytro technology means that the headaches of focusing a shot go away. Richard Koci Hernandez, a photojournalist, said that when he tried out a prototype earlier this year, he immediately recognized the potential impact.

“You just concentrate on the image and composition, but there’s no need to worry about focus anymore,” Mr. Hernandez said. “That’s something you do later.”

Photo

Ren Ng, chief executive of Lytro, a start-up company in Silicon Valley.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“That was the aha! moment for me,” said Mr. Hernandez, an assistant professor of new media at the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “This is game-changing.”

Mr. Hernandez, who is not affiliated with Lytro, was one of several photographers who tested prototypes. His model, he said, was sheathed in a black plastic shell, so he did not see its design. But he said it was the size of a standard point-and-shoot camera. The picture resolution, he added, was indistinguishable from that of his other point-and-shoots, a Canon and a Nikon.

Eliminating any loss of resolution in a camera like Lytro’s, which is capturing light data from many angles, is a real advance, said Shree Nayar, a professor at Columbia University and an expert in computer vision. Mr. Nayar is familiar with Mr. Ng’s work, but he said he had not seen anything Lytro has done in more than a year.

“If they have been able to recover most of the lost resolution, then their image refocusing application is a very cool feature,” Mr. Nayar said. “But it is an open question how popular it becomes.”

At Lytro, the view is that the technology, once it gets into people’s hands, opens the door to many possible new features and uses. Among its other advantages, the new camera is much faster than conventional ones because there is no “shutter lag” — waiting for the autofocus device to work and the shot to be taken. Those fractions of a second, of course, are often when the dog darts off or the child’s smile becomes a frown.

Lytro cameras can also capture plenty of data for 3-D images, which can be viewed on a computer screen with 3-D glasses.

Lytro is not saying what the price of its first camera will be, but insists it will be for the consumer market, which suggests a price of a few hundred dollars. The company is also not being more precise about when the camera will ship. It will initially be sold through online retailers like Amazon.com and Lytro’s Web site.

But to gear up, the company is rapidly adding to its 45-person staff in Mountain View, Calif. Its recruits include veterans of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel and Sun Microsystems.

One Lytro convert who caught the attention of the Valley digerati was Kurt Akeley, who joined the company last September from Microsoft Research. Mr. Akeley, 53, was one of the early engineers at Silicon Graphics, a pioneer in computer graphics, and is one of the lead developers of OpenGL, a popular set of graphics programming tools.

Mr. Akeley, a consulting professor at Stanford, was familiar with Mr. Ng’s work and said he was lured by the challenge and technical opportunity. Lytro, Mr. Akeley said, has “a powerful technology with legs — great things can happen.”

Lytro chose to design and market a camera itself, instead of licensing its technology to a camera giant like Canon or Nikon. It will farm out the manufacturing to a company in Taiwan, but it wanted to control the details of the camera itself — much as Apple does.

“We can just make a better product this way, and really show what we can do,” Mr. Ng said. “The big camera makers are mostly polishing existing technology, and we didn’t want to do this in an incremental way.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 22, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Start-Up’s Camera Lets You Take Shots First and Focus Later. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe